George Bosque; Guard Stole $1.85 Million

George Manuel Bosque, the Brink’s guard who in 1980 took $1.85 million from an armored truck he was hired to protect and spent it on a nationwide spree, is dead.

The Associated Press reported Wednesday that he had been found dead in his San Francisco apartment on Monday.

The coroner’s office said the exact cause of death won’t be known for up to six weeks. However, the San Francisco Examiner reported Wednesday that Bosque “died of an apparent drug overdose.” He was 36.

Bosque managed to evade capture for 15 months after the Aug. 15, 1980, robbery. He was arrested in a San Francisco supermarket parking lot with only $100 in his pocket after a friend seeking a $50,000 reward called police. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison but was paroled in 1986.

Bosque had disappeared from San Francisco International Airport with two sacks of $50 and $100 bills that were part of a $17-million shipment from Hawaiian banks to the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco.

“I had a lot on my mind,” Bosque said later without elaborating. “There was all that money there, and it seemed like the answer. . . .”

Bosque said he spent or gave away the money over the next year, living in penthouse suites and riding in limousines, helicopters and cabin cruisers. He squandered the money in stops in New York, Denver, Chicago and Florida.

He once spent $60,000 to furnish and decorate a $1,160-a-month Greenwich Village apartment. Furnishings included modular seating covered with elephant hide, a solid brass bed and a $10,000 dining room table.

The FBI recovered $20,000 that had been sent to one of Bosque’s friends and $10,000 that went to the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, where Bosque once worked as an animal control officer.

“Please use this humble amount to benefit our animals,” read a note from “Mr. Anonymous.”

“My biggest enjoyment with the money came about when I shared it with other people,” he said after his conviction.